Dragonfield: And Other Stories Read online

  This so startled the old man that he was speechless for the first time in his life. And as he could not find the words to tell the child to go, it stayed. Yet after a day, when he had found the words, the potter knew he could not utter them for the child’s perfect face and figure had enchanted him.

  When the potter worked or ate or slept, the child was by his side, speaking when spoken to but otherwise still. It was a pot child, after all, and not a real child. It did not join him in his work but was content to watch. When other people came to the old man’s shop, the child stepped back onto the urn and did not move. Only the potter knew it was alive.

  One day several famous people came to the potter’s shop. He showed them all around, grudgingly, touching one pot and then another. He answered their questions in a voice that was crusty and hard. But they knew his reputation and did not answer back.

  At last they came to the urn.

  The old man stood before it and sighed. It was such an uncharacteristic sound that the people looked at him strangely. But the potter did not notice. He simply stood for a moment more, then said, “This is the Pot Child. It is my masterpiece. I shall never make another one so fine.”

  He moved away, and one woman said after him, “It is good.” But turning to her companions, she added in a low voice, “But it is too perfect for me.”

  A man with her agreed. “It lacks something,” he whispered back.

  The woman thought a moment. “It has no heart,” she said. “That is what is wrong.”

  “It has no soul,” he amended.

  They nodded at each other and turned away from the urn. The woman picked out several small bowls, and, paying for them, she and the others went away.

  No sooner were the people out of sight than the pot child stepped down from the urn.

  “Father,” the pot child asked, “what is a heart?”

  “A vastly overrated part of the body,” said the old man gruffly. He turned to work the clay on his wheel.

  “Then,” thought the pot child, “I am better off without one.” It watched as the clay grew first tall and then wide between the potter’s knowing palms. It hesitated asking another question, but at last could bear it no longer.

  “And what is a soul, Father?” asked the pot child. “Why did you not draw one on me when you made me on the urn?”

  The potter looked up in surprise. “Draw one? No one can draw a soul.”

  The child’s disappointment was so profound, the potter added, “A man’s body is like a pot, which does not disclose what is inside. Only when the pot is poured do we see its contents. Only when a man acts do we know what kind of soul he has.”

  The pot child seemed happy with that explanation, and the potter went back to his work. But over the next few weeks the child continually got in his way. When the potter worked the clay, the pot child tried to bring him water to keep the clay moist. But it spilled the water and the potter pushed the child away.

  When the potter carried the unfired pots to the kiln, the pot child tried to carry some, too. But it dropped the pots, and many were shattered. The potter started to cry out in anger, bit his tongue, and was still.

  When the potter went to fire the kiln, the pot child tried to light the flame. Instead, it blew out the fire.

  At last the potter cried, “You heartless thing. Leave me to do my work. It is all I have. How am I to keep body and soul together when I am so plagued by you?”

  At these words, the pot child sat down in the dirt, covered its face, and wept. Its tiny body heaved so with its sobs that the potter feared it would break in two. His crusty old heart softened, and he went over to the pot child and said, “There, child. I did not mean to shout so. What is it that ails you?”

  The pot child looked up. “Oh, my Father, I know I have no heart. But that is a vastly overrated part of the body. Still, I was trying to show how I was growing a soul.”

  The old man looked startled for a minute, but then, recalling their conversation of many weeks before, he said, “My poor pot child, no one can grow a soul. It is there from birth.” He touched the child lightly on the head.

  The potter had meant to console the child, but at that the child cried even harder than before. Drops sprang from its eyes and ran down its cheeks like blue glaze. “Then I shall never have a soul,” the pot child cried. “For I was not born but made.”

  Seeing how the child suffered, the old man took a deep breath. And when he let it out again, he said, “Child, as I made you, now I will make you a promise. When I die, you shall have my soul for then I shall no longer need it.”

  “Oh, then I will be truly happy,” said the pot child, slipping its little hand gratefully into the old man’s. It did not see the look of pain that crossed the old man’s face. But when it looked up at him and smiled, the old man could not help but smile back.

  That very night, under the watchful eyes of the pot child, the potter wrote out his will. It was a simple paper, but it took a long time to compose for words did not come easily to the old man. Yet as he wrote, he felt surprisingly lightened. And the pot child smiled at him all the while. At last, after many scratchings out, it was done. The potter read the paper aloud to the pot child.

  “It is good,” said the pot child. “You do not suppose I will have long to wait for my soul?”

  The old man laughed. “Not long, child.”

  And then the old man slept, tired after the late night’s labor. But he had been so busy writing, he had forgotten to bank his fire, and in the darkest part of the night, the flames went out.

  In the morning the shop was ice cold, and so was the old man. He did not waken, and without him, the pot child could not move from its shelf.

  Later in the day, when the first customers arrived, they found the old man. And beneath his cold fingers lay a piece of paper that said:

  When I am dead, place my body in

  my kiln and light the flames. And

  when I am nothing but ashes, let

  those ashes be placed inside the

  Pot Child. For I would be one, body and

  soul, with the earth I have worked.

  So it was done as the potter wished. And when the kiln was opened up, the people of the town placed the ashes in the ice-cold urn.

  At the touch of the hot ashes, the pot cracked: once across the breast of the child and two small fissures under its eyes.

  “What a shame,” said the people to one another on seeing that. “We should have waited until the ashes cooled.”

  Yet the pot was still so beautiful, and the old potter so well known, that the urn was placed at once in a museum. Many people came to gaze on it.

  One of those was the woman who had seen the pot that day so long ago at the shop.

  “Why, look,” she said to her companions. “It is the pot the old man called his masterpiece. It is good. But I like it even better now with those small cracks.”

  “Yes,” said one of her companions, “It was too perfect before.”

  “Now the pot child has real character,” said the woman, “It has … heart.”

  “Yes,” added the same companion, “it has soul.”

  And they spoke so loudly that all the people around them heard. The story of their conversation was printed and repeated throughout the land, and everyone who went by the pot stopped and murmured, as if part of a ritual, “Look at that pot child. It has such heart. It has such soul.”

  “Ah,” sighed the Dream Weaver when the tale was done. It was a great relief to her to have it over, both the weaving and the telling. She dropped her hands to her sides and thought about the artist of the tale and how he alone really knew when his great work was done, and how he had put his own heart and soul into it. For what was art, she thought, but the heart and soul made visible.

  “I thank you, my young friends,” she said to the boy and girl as they waited, hand upon hand, until she was through. “And now I can go home and sleep.”

  She finished the piece of weavin
g and held it up to them. “Will you take this one with you?” she asked.

  “But it was your dream,” said the boy hesitantly.

  The girl was more honest still. “There is nothing on it, Dream Weaver. On that—or on the other.”

  “Nothing? What do you mean—nothing?” Her voice trembled:

  “A jumble of threads,” said the girl. “Tightly woven, true, but with no picture or pattern.”

  “No picture? Nothing visible? Was there never a picture?” asked the old woman, her voice low.

  “While you told the tale,” said the boy, “there were pictures aplenty in my head and in my heart.”

  “And on the cloth?”

  “I do not really know,” admitted the girl. “For your voice spun the tale so well, I scarcely knew anything more.”

  “Ah,” said the Dream Weaver. She was silent for a moment and then said, more to herself than to the two, “So that is why no one takes their dreams.”

  “We will take your weaving if it would please you,” said the boy.

  The Dream Weaver put away her loom and threads. “It does not matter,” she said. “I see that now. Memory is the daughter of the ear and the eye. I know you will take the dream with you, in your memory, and it will last long past the weaving.”

  They helped her strap the baskets to her back. “Long past,” they assured her. Then they watched as the Dream Weaver threaded her way down the crooked streets to her home.

  The Fates

  FIRE SHADOWS ON THE wall,

  A hand rises, falls, as steady as a heartbeat,

  Threading the strands of life.

  This is the warp thread, this the woof,

  This the hero-line, this the fool.

  Needle and scissors, scissors and pins,

  Where one life ends, another begins.

  Did the silkworm come first,

  Spinning its cocoon tapestry

  So Clotho could unspin its cloak home

  Into one of her own?

  Did the Moirai learn from a worm?

  Needle and scissors, scissors and pins,

  Where one life ends, another begins.

  Or did she come upon flax as a girl

  And, seduced by its bright blue flowers,

  As blue as the branching

  Of veins beneath the fragile shield of skin,

  Crush it into fiber and thread?

  Needle and scissors, scissors and pins,

  Where one life ends, another begins.

  There was a hero, once, from Ithaca.

  See how he travels the road.

  Dust devils up under his bare feet.

  The pattern in the dust is plainweave,

  Is herringweave, is twill.

  Needle and scissors, scissors and pins,

  Where one life ends, another begins.

  So quickly the shuttle flies,

  As fast as an arrow into the heart,

  As fast as the poison of the asp

  As fast as the sword blade against the neck.

  As fast as life, as fast as death.

  Needle and scissors, scissors and pins,

  Where one life ends, another begins.

  Needle and scissors, scissors and pins

  Where one life ends, another begins

  Spindle and rod and tablet and thread,

  The scissors close—and you are dead.

  Salvage

  THE OLD POET LAY in the bow of his ship dying of space sickness and homesickness and a touch of alien flu. There was nothing to be done for him but to make him comfortable, which meant listening to his ramblings and filling his arm with a strange liquid from his own stores. He had been the only one left alive in the ship when we found it and at first we had thought him dead, too. Only at my touch he had roused up, pointed a stalk at us, and recited in a bardic chant some alien click-clacks that, run through the translator, turned out to be a spell against goblins and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night.

  Whatever night is.

  Ghoulies was his name for us.

  He had immediately fallen back into a deep sleep from which he roused periodically to harangue whoever had a free moment, calling us worms and devils and satan’s spawn. Most of us decided to leave his mouthings untranslated since what spewed out of the machine made little sense and we had not time to properly salvage it. The boxes, after all, were not yet full.

  But one of the younglings, a two-year named Necros 29, chose to sit with the poet-traveler and translate his every word. Necros 29 called it salvage, but I wondered. He comes from a family of puzzlers, though, and they are slow to mature and mate and it may be that that side of the line runs true, for it was he who first understood that the creature was a poet, or at least a speaker-of-poems. It was soon clear that the alien did not make up his poems as would any true poet, but rather carried the words of others in his head. Disgusting thought, a crime against nature, this salvage of the mind. If we saved up all our poems, our heads would soon be so crowded with them, there would be no room left for savoring new ones. What a strange race we had come upon, whose equipment is new and whose thoughts are so borrowed and old.

  But Necros, being a puzzler, kept at his task while we scavenged the ship thoroughly. It was full of salvage and the bones of the poet’s companions were especially fine.

  “He calls upon the names of many gods,” commented Necros to me during report, “and that is fine for a poet. But he also says many not-found things.”

  “Such as?” I asked. My great-great-grandsire, Mordos Prime, had been a puzzler on his matriarchal side, though my mother denies it when asked. Occasionally I am drawn to such things though basically I am of a solider nature.

  “He speaks of night, a darkness that ends and comes again.”

  I passed the bones through my mouth and into the salvage sack before I spoke. They were, as I have said, very fine indeed. As the sack’s teeth ground the bones into dust, I said, “Is night then a birthing cave? Is it the winking of far stars against the Oneness of space?”

  Many who heard, me laughed, their sections wiggling greatly with their amusement.

  Necros shook his head and his eyestalks trembled. “I do not think so. But I will listen to him further. I think there may be some strong salvage in his thoughts.”

  “Pah, it is worthless stuff,” remarked my old mate, the long cylinder of his head shaking. His salvage sack was full and grinding away and the rolling action of it under his belly excited me. But now was the time of work, not pleasure. The boxes were not yet full and it would be days more of grinding before our organs descended enough to touch.

  I went back across the boarding platform that linked the silent ship to ours. I emptied my sack of the fine silt, spreading it thinly over the mating box. Days? It would be weeks if we did not fill the boxes faster. As Prime of this ship it was my duty to direct young Necros away from the live poet to the dead and salvageable parts. It is all very well to salvage a culture when the boxes are full but—and I remembered my old mate’s rolling sack—there is an order, after all, and poetry would have to wait.

  Mouthing a small lump of unground bone out of the box, I swallowed it again. Then I turned back and crossed over the platform to the alien ship.

  “Necros!” I called out as I crawled. “Come. I would talk with you.”

  He came at once, though with a slight reluctance on his face, his stalks drooping and his first section slightly faded. I think he already knew what I had to say.

  “The boxes are thin,” I said. “There is no time for him.” I gestured with one stalk towards the alien who raised on one side and was babbling again.

  “Fe-fi-fo-fum,” spewed the translator. Nonsense in any language is still nonsense. “Be he live or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”

  “What in the universe is bread?” I asked.

  Necros touched me, mouth to mouth, then raised his chin, showing me his neck section, the fine lumps of his heart beating a rhythm through the translu
cent skin. He could not have been more subservient.

  “I will work long into the third work period,” he said. “Do you not see that it is such things—bread, night, seasons—that we must salvage from him. Only with salvage,” he reminded me, “is growth.”

  I thought of the silty boxes where we would soon lie down and mate, starting the next generation wiggling through our bodies and out our mouths. “Yes,” I said at last, “you are right this time. But still you will have to work the extra period to make up for it.”

  He quivered sectionally and scurried back to the alien. At his touch, the alien fainted, though I suspected that he would revive again soon.

  Necros 29 kept his word. He worked the extra load and so much salvage quickened him. He entered maturity early yet lost none of the enthusiasm of a youngling. It was delightful to see.

  Once he came to me wriggling with joy. “I have come to something new,” he said. “Something not-found which is now found. It is called haiku.” He savored the word and gave it directly into my mouth.

  I let the word slide down slowly, section by section, to my sack and the slow grinding began. Then it stopped. “I do not comprehend this word, haiku,” I said. “It means no more than his fe-fi’s.”

  Necros shivered deliciously. “It is a poem that is worked in sections,” he said.

  “A poem in sections?” It was a new idea—and quite fine.

  “There are seventeen sections broken into bodies of five-seven-five. And there are rules.”

  “That is the first time your poet has shown that he understands order,” I said thoughtfully. “Perhaps I was right to let you salvage him.”

  Necros nodded, showing his neck section for good measure. “These are the rules. First the poem must rouse emotion.”

  “Well, of course. Any youngling knows that.” I turned partly away from him, to show my displeasure.

  “Wait, there is more. Second, the poem must show spiritual insight.” He nodded his head and his sections moved like a wave, enticing.

  “Still, that is not new.”

  Necros drew out the last. “And finally there must be some use of the seasons.”